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Muffins (Eggs cups sifted flour cup)
2 eggs 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1/4 cup lukewarm water 2 level tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons melted lard 1/2 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm liquid; add the lard (or butter), eggs. beaten until light, and flour to make a moderately stiff batter; then add the salt and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside in a warm place for about one hour. When risen, fill well-greased muffin tins half full; cover and let rise again for about half an hour. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven, and serve at once.
These are raised (yeast) muffins rather than the quick, baking-powder kind, and the recipe as printed has one significant gap.
- The yeast quantity is missingThe method says "dissolve the yeast" but no yeast appears in the ingredient list, an omission in the printed ingredient list. Recipes of this size often call for one cake of compressed yeast, roughly equivalent to a 2 1/4-teaspoon packet of active dry, but the original does not say so and we are not going to guess on its behalf.
- Scalded and cooled milkScalding was done to knock back enzymes and bacteria in unpasteurised milk; with modern pasteurised milk it is optional, though warming it to lukewarm still helps the yeast start. It must be cool enough not to kill the yeast — blood temperature at most.
- "A hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a half-filled standard muffin tin; smaller gem pans will likely be done nearer fifteen.
- LardTwo tablespoons of melted lard gives a slightly shorter, softer crumb than butter. The recipe already offers butter as the alternative; a neutral oil works as well.
- Batter, not dough"Moderately stiff batter" means it should drop heavily from a spoon rather than be kneadable. Beat it well after the salt goes in — this is the only gluten development the muffins get, since there is no kneading stage.
- The two risesAn hour covered in a warm place, then about thirty minutes in the greased tins. Both are guides; judge by volume, roughly doubled, not by clock. Fill the cups only half full, as directed, or they will spill over the second rise.
- Yield and servingProbably around a dozen standard muffins. "Serve at once" is not a flourish: yeast-raised muffins of this type stale quickly.
Before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, a "muffin" in English and American kitchens meant a yeast-raised batter cake — cooked either on a griddle in rings, like the English muffin, or in the small iron gem pans that spread through American households in the later nineteenth century. Recipes like this one sit at the crossover point: the ingredient list and the muffin tin belong to the twentieth-century breakfast table, while the yeast and the double rise belong to an older tradition.